Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy CI – Trends and Outlook

In November 2025, I delivered a presentation to a client on Russian strikes against Ukrainian critical infrastructure (CI). The key points from that presentation are outlined below. Although the presentation is now slightly dated, its core assessments remain valid.

One important caveat should be noted. We track Russian drone and missile attacks primarily through daily reports issued by the Ukrainian Air Force. This approach has clear implications for data reliability, particularly as reporting has become increasingly obfuscated. From an open-source perspective, reliance on a single data source warrants caution. Accordingly, readers are encouraged to focus on broader trends rather than on precise figures.

Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy CI – Trends and Outlook

Since late summer 2025, Russia has shifted to a systematic, high-tempo strike pattern against the Ukrainian power and gas sectors, with large, record-breaking barrages in AUG, SEP, OCT, and NOV (e.g., 810-system attack on 07 SEP, 450+ drones & 45 missiles on 08 NOV).

Geographic concentration: border oblasts and frontline cities are the priority targets

Russian long-range strike activity over the past months shows a clear and deliberate geographic concentration. The bulk of the Geran and missile attacks are directed against Ukraine’s border oblasts and large frontline cities, particularly Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Mykolaiv. These areas sit within easy strike range from Russian launch sites and serve as critical junctions of Ukraine’s electrical, gas, and logistics networks. The availability of cheap mass-produced Gerans allows Russia to attack dozens of relatively small but operationally important nodes—especially 110–330 kV substations, switching stations, distribution hubs, and gas compressor stations—many of which lie close to the border. The intent is straightforward: by hitting key substations, Russia can collapse entire local grids, isolate cities like Nizhyn, Shostka, and Nikopol, and force Ukraine to divert scarce repair teams and air-defence assets away from deeper strategic targets. Texty’s mapped data shows this pattern clearly: clusters of strikes align with the location of network-critical transformers and major east–west transmission corridors, where even a handful of successful hits create cascading outages. This targeted pressure on border regions acts as both an attritional strategy—destroying assets faster than Ukraine can repair them—and as a shaping operation for deeper strikes into the country’s energy system.

Russia is systematically degrading Ukraine’s manoeuvring generation capacity

Russia’s strike campaign shows a deliberate focus on destroying Ukraine’s manoeuvring generation capacity—the thermal (TPP), gas-fired, and hydroelectric (HPP) plants that provide the rapid load-balancing the grid depends on. Unlike nuclear plants, which supply stable baseload, manoeuvring assets can ramp output up and down within minutes, stabilising the system during peaks or emergencies. Russia has systematically targeted these facilities throughout autumn 2025. Large HPPs along the Dnipro cascade were struck repeatedly, most notably on 10 October, undermining Ukraine’s ability to respond to sudden fluctuations in demand. Thermal plants on the Left Bank of Kyiv, already damaged in earlier waves, were hit again in mid-October, with the clear intent of depriving the capital of both electricity and heat ahead of winter. This was followed by coordinated cruise-missile strikes on central and western TPPs on 22 October, demonstrating that Russia’s targeting is not confined to the east. The culmination of this pattern came on 8 November, when simultaneous strikes on Tsentrenergo facilities reduced their generation to zero, while damage to substations feeding the Khmelnytskyi and Rivne NPPs threatened the grid’s ability to move nuclear power where it was needed. By degrading manoeuvring capacity, Russia is not just damaging infrastructure—it is attacking the grid’s flexibility, making each subsequent strike more destabilising and harder for Ukraine to absorb.

Gas production and gas transport infrastructure are under attack

Russia’s strike campaign has placed Ukraine’s gas sector under the heaviest and most sustained pressure of the war. Gas production fields in Poltava and Kharkiv oblasts, located only 50–80 km from Russian lines, have become priority targets since early autumn 2025. On 3 October, Russia launched what Ukrainian officials and Bloomberg describe as the largest attack on gas production in the entire war, combining around 35 missiles and 60 drones against Naftogaz facilities and temporarily knocking out approximately 60% of national extraction. The offensive intensified on 16 October, when a coordinated salvo of 300+ Gerans and 37 missiles struck the Shebelinka gas-processing plant and multiple surrounding production sites, inflicting long-duration damage to critical equipment. By 28 October, Naftogaz publicly confirmed seven massive attacks on gas infrastructure in a single month. The campaign culminated in the 8 November strike—Russia’s ninth major attack in ~five weeks—which hit extraction, processing, and pipeline support infrastructure simultaneously. Beyond domestic production, Russia has also sought to disrupt import compensation routes: on 6 August, it attacked the Orlivka compressor station, a key node of the Trans-Balkan pipeline that channels LNG from Greece and test volumes of Azerbaijani gas into Ukraine’s underground storage. Together, these strikes represent a shift in Russian strategy: the gas sector is no longer a secondary or opportunistic target—it is a primary strategic objective, attacked systematically to undermine both electricity generation and winter heating capacity, while limiting Ukraine’s ability to offset losses through European imports.

Deep-country strikes continue

A persistent misconception in Ukrainian and Western public debate is that Russia’s 2025 energy campaign is primarily focused on the Left Bank, and that strikes deeper into central and western Ukraine will be limited or unsustainable. The strike data from August–November 2025 clearly contradicts this. While proximity makes Left Bank energy assets easier to hit, Russia has repeatedly demonstrated both capability and intent to engage deep-country infrastructure.

The 22 October strike package marked a major kinetic push westward. Russia used long-range cruise missiles—primarily Kalibr variants—to hit large thermal power plants across central and western oblasts, including facilities hundreds of kilometres from the front. This was followed by additional salvos in early November, culminating in strikes on Khmelnytskyi TPP, Rivne-area substations, and elements of the 800–330 kV transmission network feeding western industrial centres. The pattern shows Russia is willing to absorb higher attrition rates on cruise missiles if the payoff is significant: disabling manoeuvring generation far from the front, disrupting power routing from nuclear plants, and forcing Ukraine into nationwide load-shedding.

Deep-country strikes also align with Russia’s evolving doctrine. With Gerans used to saturate border regions, Russia preserves scarce cruise missiles and modified long-range Iskanders for high-value targets in the geographic interior. This ensures that no part of Ukraine’s energy system is genuinely safe or insulated. The cumulative picture is unambiguous: despite claims that Russia “won’t waste missiles on the West,” the campaign has become nationwide, multi-layered, and strategically integrated, targeting wherever the grid is most vulnerable, not merely where geography is convenient.

Changed strike packages

The integrated missile–drone dataset shows that by summer 2025 Russia has effectively re-engineered its long-range strike complex. A clear structural shift occured in the aftermath of the Operation Spiderweb on 01 June 2025. Prior to this point, Russia routinely launched large missile salvos, including a notable number of very large packages of 80–120 missiles. Across some 291 pre-Spiderweb salvos, the average package size was around fifteen missiles, with a median of five — but this conceals nearly fifty “big” salvos of thirty or more missiles, averaging over sixty missiles apiece. Thirteen of these exceeded eighty missiles, forming the classic multi-axis 90–120-round raids of 2022–24.

After 01 June 2025, this pattern disappears entirely. Across eighty-three post-Spiderweb salvos, the overall average size drops marginally — from roughly 15.3 to 14.3 missiles — but the composition changes profoundly. Large salvos become much rarer and smaller: the median size for “big” salvos falls from fifty-one to forty-three missiles, and the average from sixty-three to forty-two. Most importantly, the era of the 90–120-missile strike ends altogether. From spring 2025 onward, Russia no longer attempts large, multi-axis missile barrages. Instead, the typical profile becomes a 30–70-missile wave embedded within far larger Shahed/Geran drone swarms.

This evolution is driven by a dramatic transformation on the drone side. Daily volumes of long-range weapons more than triple after 01 June 2025, but almost all of the additional mass comes from Gerans: their average launch rate quadruples, and they account for roughly 96% of all projectiles fired in the post-Spiderweb period. Russia thus shifts its strike economy from expensive cruise-missile saturation to mass drone saturation. Non-Gerna missiles remain at a low and almost constant average (~6–7 per day), but are employed in fewer, more curated salvoes directed at high-value nodes — thermal and hydro plants, gas processing facilities, compressor stations, and key substations serving NPPs and the high-voltage grid.

Interception dynamics also change markedly. Before Spiderweb, Ukraine intercepted on average about 46% of missiles per salvo. After Spiderweb, this falls to roughly 34%, even as salvos shrink. For large salvos, the interception rate remains relatively stable (~two-thirds), but the overall picture deteriorates because Russia increasingly relies on small and medium packages, especially ballistic missiles and weapons with depressed trajectories, where interception is more difficult. At the same time, mixed raids combining hundreds of drones with a smaller missile segment ensure that even modest missile quantities can penetrate a stretched and attrited IADS envelope.

Taken together, these shifts explain why the autumn 2025 campaign against energy and gas infrastructure is the most destructive of the war. The most serious damage — to gas fields and processing nodes in Kharkiv and Poltava oblasts, Pavlohradvuhillya and Dobropillia coal assets, the Dnipro HPP cascade, Left-Bank Kyiv thermal plants, Tsentrenergo facilities, and critical 330–750 kV substations — is delivered not by the large 100-missile salvos of 2022–24, but by 30–60-missile waves paired with 100–800-drone raids and expanded use of Iskander-M and S-300/400 missiles in a ground-attack role. These are precisely the systems with the lowest intercept rates and the greatest capacity to generate cascading outages.

Spiderweb, therefore, marks a decisive inflexion point. From June 2025 onward, Russia abandons high-cost episodic missile shock in favour of sustained pressure, heavier reliance on ballistics, and massive drone saturation. The numbers reveal a consistent trilogy: big missile salvos shrink, a higher proportion of missiles get through, and the cumulative damage to critical infrastructure increases sharply. This shift is qualitative, not merely quantitative — and Ukraine’s degrading IADS capacity only amplifies the effect.

Chart 1. Russian missile strikes on Ukraine since September 2022 (Shaheds/Geran-2s excluded) (Source: Ukrainian Air Force Command)

Chart 2. Reported monthly number of fired Shahed 131/136/Geran-2 kamikaze drones since September  2022 (Source: Ukrainian Air Force Command)

Outlook

Looking at Russian strikes from a linear perspective, there is little indication that Moscow intends to reduce pressure on Ukraine’s energy system during the winter of 2025–26. The post-June 2025 pattern points to a deliberate shift toward a winter-long, multi-domain campaign against critical infrastructure. Gerans have been industrialised into a mass-saturation tool, with regular swarms in the 300–800 range, while missile salvos—although smaller than in 2022–24—are more precisely directed at high-value nodes such as TPP boiler halls, gas-processing plants, compressor stations, and 330–750 kV substations. Russia has also demonstrated its willingness to range deep into central and western Ukraine with cruise missiles, contradicting the assumption that the campaign would remain confined to the Left Bank.

The strike logic is now consistent: use drones to exhaust and fragment air-defence coverage and repair capacity at the periphery, then employ a smaller number of high-end missiles and ballistic systems to destroy key manoeuvring assets and gas infrastructure in the interior.

Given the cumulative degradation of thermal, hydro, and gas-generation capacity, each additional wave this winter will land on a progressively weaker system with diminishing redundancy and narrower margins for error. Moscow has not exhausted its target set: remaining TPP units, surviving Dnipro HPP assets, NPP-adjacent substations, major storage sites, and the residual coal-and-gas supply chain all remain attractive targets. At the same time, strikes on compressor stations such as Orlivka indicate an understanding of the value of interdiction against import routes and storage logistics, not merely domestic production.

Barring an abrupt political decision in Moscow or a step-change in Ukrainian air defence and repair capacity, the most realistic outlook is a sustained, campaign-style offensive throughout the winter—intended to keep Ukraine permanently close to the edge of systemic failure rather than trigger a single, dramatic country-wide blackout event.

However, from a non-linear perspective, Russia has repeatedly stopped short of completely collapsing Ukraine’s power grid. The grid was close to failure in 2022, yet the tempo of Russian strikes declined. With mass Geran production, Russia has the capacity to impose far higher costs on Ukraine’s energy system than it has chosen to. Since Moscow still pursues maximalist political objectives over Ukraine, it may not be in its interest to inherit a country without electricity. This could limit the overall intensity of strikes even if they continue at a steady rhythm.

Another factor shaping the outlook is the tempo of Ukrainian strikes on Russian critical infrastructure. If Ukrainian attacks accelerate in frequency or effectiveness, Moscow may feel compelled to escalate its own response, potentially shifting the intensity or target selection of its campaign.